THE HABENULA DISAPPOINTMENT

HERE'S MY FAVORITE piece of trivia I the whole world : Dr. Marie Sktodowska-Curie showed up to her wedding ceremony wearing her lab gown.

It's actually a pretty cool story: a sceintist friend hooked her up with Pierre Curie. They awkwardly admitted to having read each other's paper and flirted over breaks full of liquid uranium, and he proposed within the year. But Marie was only meant to be in France to get her degree, and reluctantly rejected him to return to Poland.

Womp womp.

Enter the University of Krakow, villain and unintentional cupid of his story, which denied Marie a faculty position because she was a woman (very classy, U of K). **** move, I know, but it had the fortunate side effect of pushing Marie right back into Pierre's loving not-yet-radioactive arms. Those two beautiful nerds married in 1895,

and Marie, who wasn't exactly making bank at the time, bought her- self a wedding dress that was comfortable enough to use in the lab every day. My girl was nothing if not pragmatic.

Of course, this story becames significantly less cool if you fast forward ten years or so, to when Pierre's got himself run over by a carriage and left Marrie and thier two daughters alone in the world. Zoom into 1906, and that's where you'll find the real moral of this tale: trusting people to stick around is a bad idea. One way or another they'll be kidnapped by alien and vanish into the vastness of space. Or maybe they'll have sex with your best friend six months before you're due to get married, forcing you to call off the wedding and loss tons of cash in security deposits.

the sky's the limit, really.

One might say, then, that U of K is only a minor villian. Don't get me wrong: I love picturing Dr.Curie waltzing back to Krakow pretty woman-style, wearing he wedding-slash-lab grown, brandishing her two Noble Prize medals, and yelling, "Big Mistake. Big. Huge." But the real villian, the one that had Marie crying and staring at the ceiling in the late hours of the hours of the night, is loss. Grief. The intrinsic transience of human relationships. The real villian is love:an unstable isotope, constantly undergoing spontaneous nuclear decay.

And it will forever go unpunished.

Do you know what's reliable instead? What never, ever abandoned Dr. Curie in all her years? Her curiosity. Her discoveries. Her accomplishments.

Science. Science is where it's at.

Which is why when NASA notifies me-- Me! Bee konigswasser!----- that I've been chosen as lead investigator of BLINK, one of their most prestigious neuroengineering research projects, I screech. I screech loudly and joyously in my minuscule, windowless office on the Bethesda campus for the National Institutes of Health. I screech about the amazing performance-enhancing technology I'm going to build for none other than NASA astronauts, and then I remember that the walls are toilet-paper thin and that my left neighbours once filed a formal complaint against me for listening to nineties female alt-rocks without headphones. So I press the back of my hand to my mouth, bite into it, and jump up and down as sliently as possible while elation explodes inside me.

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